I’ve been following the retailer GameStop (GME) on and off for a couple years now. It’s trading at $4.80 a share with a market cap of $490m. The stock has been in free fall for a couple years now. It did stabilize for a bit last year when they were shopping the company around but they ended up not doing anything.
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
They recently slashed the dividend that had a yield of over 10%. The move will save them $157 million a year. When you see a juicy 10% dividend yield, it usually means that it’s too good to be truth. The large majority of times it means that the company is not healthy and I’m not surprised they cut it. They have a failing business with $468m in debt plus $550m in operating leases.
I’m looking at it for a shorting point of view. Shorting is very risky even though GameStop gives you the vibe that it’s the next Blockbusters. People are playing videogames more than ever. It’s just they are not buying their games at GameStop like they used too.
GME might survive, in a different form. They have a collectible business that is growing but very small. Somebody might take them private. They just announced a Dutch Auction buyback. Maybe its a zero. They have enough cash to pay their bills for a while. They have Net Operating Losses (NOL) which could be attractive to another retailer. Shorting is a hard game to play. Plus betting on a retailer going to zero is not a game I’m comfortable with. That’s why I don’t short.
They operate 5,800 stores in 14 countries. I don’t know what’s going with ThinkGeek.com. They bought the company in 2015 for $140m and I know they took some impairment charges on the brand name.
The reality is that the long-term outlook of their core business doesn’t look good. They are in the wrong line of business at the wrong time. Sure the next generation of consoles (PS5 and Xbox) might give them a short-term boost (or hurt them because people are delaying their game purchase), but the hard reality is that all the games are going over the cloud. It’s much more convenient and more profitable. They are cutting out the middle men by going directly to the consumer (digital delivery). This is a pattern we have seen with music, video, and now video games. It’s just taking longer for video games because of the more demanding hardware/software/Internet requirements. We have the technology today. When was the last time you bought a music CD or a DVD? Video games are going the same way.
A hobby retailer that seems to be doing well is Games Workshop (GAW.l), which is the company behind Warhammer. Maybe GameStop with their collectibles and reach can emulate the good side of that business. But it would have to be on a smaller scale on cheap rent real estate. That’s probably not what investor want to hear.
Ironically, GameStop was once a streaming video game innovator. It bought Spawn Labs in 2011 to create a kind of Netflix for video games. But it was too early: The technology wasn’t quite ready, and GameStop shut down Spawn Labs in 2014.
The competing landscape is also changing. Google is getting into gaming with Stadia, a cloud gaming streaming service. Apple is getting in the business too. Nintendo is pushing their games on the mobile. And Sony and Microsoft are working on the next generation of console.
I don’t know what happened in the board room when they were looking to sell the company around. Maybe the offer wasn’t good enough (I bet it looks great in hindsight now). The business of selling new and used console is a dying one. The business would be good in the hands of independent retailer or a private owner that has the patience to work things out.
Article by Brian Langis
